Career Concerns and Management Earnings Guidance
研究发现，职业担忧更强的CEO更倾向于发布保守的向下盈利指引，以增加达到或超越市场预期的可能性，但分析师会理性调整预测，使这些CEO并未更易超越预期。
Abstract This study provides evidence that managers' career concerns affect their earnings guidance decisions. We hypothesize that CEO s who are relatively more concerned about assessments of their abilities have stronger incentives to guide the market expectations of earnings downwards to increase the likelihood of meeting or beating the expectations. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that (i) short‐tenured CEO s, CEO s promoted from inside the firm, and nonfounder CEO s are more likely to provide downward earnings guidance when they have bad news, and (ii) their downward guidance tends to be more conservative. In response, analysts revise earnings forecasts less for the downward guidance provided by more career‐concerned CEO s. This indicates that analysts rationally incorporate these CEO s' stronger incentives to be conservative in their earnings guidance. Consequently, we find that CEO s with greater career concerns are not more likely to beat the market expectations, even when they provide more conservative downward guidance.